by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

Eduardo Jabulan and his wife sell small plastic bags of vegetable oil, from a can they found in the rubble of their home, flattened in this typhoon-crushed city in the central Philippines.

Their three daughters, 3, 7 and 8, drowned in Typhoon Haiyan. The parents had little time to grieve, though. Their focus every day for three weeks since Haiyan struck on Nov. 8 has been on finding food, water and a safe spot to sleep.

"We sell the oil to buy food to eat," says Jabulan, 40, a port security guard whose job ended after Haiyan hit. "We will stay in Tacloban and hope to have more children."

Despite small signs that this area is recovering, life remains far from normal for countless Filipinos who have struggled through days of horror and hunger. More than 5,000 people died in the typhoon, and hundreds more are missing. The survivors are wondering when they'll have their lives back.

Authorities in the Philippine capital of Manila promise an action plan by early December that will lay out the three to five years of reconstruction and rehabilitation work needed in the hardest-hit areas, said the Department of Budget and Management.

"The national government has to build a community of homes that should be able to weather the storm," Tacloban Mayor Alfred Romualdez says.

Many Filipinos are calling for a different approach, however. Rather than just rebuild, they say the Philippines should take some lessons from Haiyan so that a land that appeared ill-prepared for a monster typhoon despite an average of 20 tropical storms every year is better prepared going forward.

Yet major hurdles may stymie change.

Many of the victims may have survived if they did not live in such flimsy housing. But stronger homes, sturdier evacuation shelters, and comprehensive relocation programs require massive funding in what is one of the poorest countries in the region.

Political bickering between rival clans has already flared, bureaucratic red tape could delay reconstruction, and public attitudes on safety remain stubbornly lax.

Filipino familiarity with typhoons has long failed to translate into better national preparedness, warned Bobit Avila, a commentator in the Philippine Star newspaper.

"Just like our political system and our economy, the biggest problem of the Filipino people is always the same year after year â?¦ that we never get to fix ourselves," he wrote Saturday.

A NEED FOR PLAINER LANGUAGE

For days now, U.S. military planes and helicopters have been flying relief goods - food, medicines, shelter and hygiene kits - to the hard-hit island provinces of Leyte and Samar.

The essentials share space with other supplies of a more personal nature. Three-thousand rosaries from the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines were flown in, and the education secretary wants cases of lipstick, too, to boost teacher morale.

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A stench coming from piles of debris of what once were homes indicates that bodies remain trapped underneath despite the ongoing effort to bury victims. Major roads on Samar and Leyte were clear and some banks, grocery stores and gas stations open.

Amid the recovery, Philippine President Benigno Aquino has been talking about shifting the emphasis to prevention of such tragedies. He has criticized the local government here for what he says is a lack of preparation. He says the Philippines must spread awareness of the possibility of typhoon-triggered "storm surges" like Haiyan's and quickly map out the storm-surge danger areas along the coastline.

It was largely the surge of seawater pushed on by the typhoon's 147 mph winds that caused the destruction of Tacloban. Government forecasters had warned of a 22-foot storm surge, but "no one understood 'storm surge,'" says Corazon Soliman, secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development in the Philippines. They were preparing for the usual wind and rain of a typhoon.

"The first lesson is that we need people to understand it's like a flood or tsunami, so they have time to go upstairs," she says at the Tacloban "Astrodome," a crowded evacuation center where some refugees drowned.

Those deaths highlight the need to revise city building codes and area zoning, Romualdez says. Many current shelters, mostly gyms and schools, cannot withstand storms of Haiyan-like strength, he says.

"The national government should come up with a template for response," he adds, pointing the finger of blame at Manila.

He complains that the Philippines needs a well-trained disaster management agency to replace the current consultative body, which lacks even a single satellite phone.

MAYOR TECSON TAKES ON SEASIDE SHANTIES

In Tanauan town, south of Tacloban, Mayor Pel Tecson, 45, has become known for bold strokes. One day after Haiyan, Tecson took a motorbike, winding past corpses and fallen trees, to Tacloban airport. There, he persuaded a U.S. volunteer team, Mammoth Medical Missions, newly arrived from California, to come with him to Tanauan.

People in Tanauan were amazed at the kind of work that is possible from highly trained disaster-relief professionals.

"It was unbelievable. They had no lights and no electric, but they worked so fast. They performed miracles with just an office desk as their operating table," remembered the mayor's wife, Penny Tecson, 45.

In addition to establishing better disaster relief locally, the city council here says more lives would have been saved if not so many people had been allowed to put homes so close to the sea.

The council passed a resolution Monday making a non-build zone from the shoreline to 150 feet inland.

The need for relocation of vulnerable communities "is the big lesson to be learned from the experience," says Tecson, who plans to move 15,000 of the town's 40,000 residents to new areas.

But that may not be so easy.

At the San Roce slum, close to the shore, Edmund Salano, 38, picks his way through waist-high debris of smashed shanty dwellings, trying to ignore the smell of unrecovered corpses. Like many Filipino men, he refused to evacuate as Haiyan approached because he wanted to keep watch over his house and belongings.

"My sister is missing and we cannot find her body, and her two missing kids," says Salano, a fisherman who swam to safety with his two young children.

"The mayor says he won't let us live here again, but I will, although next time, I will go to an evacuation center," he says.

Still, Tecson says he believes Haiyan "is a game-changer" that will alter the way the town thinks about typhoons and how to handle them.

"Other mayors have to think in the same way. I hope Tanauan can become a model," he says. "Our people are resilient to hardship. You can still see smiles on their faces."

THE POLITICS OF IT ALL

In Tacloban, mayor Romualdez plans to relocate residents and pay for their new housing. But he warns of the lack of suitable space in a city of more than 200,000, five times larger than Tanauan.

"We can't even pinpoint the number of the dead," let alone estimate the number of people to move, he says.

But there is another possible obstacle to change: political infighting.

"I hope (Haiyan) will be a game-changer, but apparently, it's not what the national government wants," says Romualdez, who resents President Aquino's move to investigate the Tacloban city government and Romualdez for "not preparing" for this disaster. Aquino and Romualdez are from the two rival clans of Philippine politics.

"How can I inspire and empower the people if they are starting an investigation in the middle of all this?" he asks.

Some survivors are perhaps beyond inspiration. Close to the water, a large boat lies on top of the housing it smashed when washed ashore. Arnal Erandio, 44, drinks from a small bottle of gin he bought from a reopened store.

"I am the only survivor. I can only drink now," he says, having lost his wife and three children.

"My children are under that boat. I want to get their bodies, and I want stay here by the sea."